With the release of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation now upon us, a film that will undoubtedly clean up at the box office and remind us that Tom Cruise’s Peter Pan like action skills still rock, there’s one man in the cast that won’t be relying on bangs or wallops to wow us – just steely-eyed grit and a dry wit.

The man is of course Alec Baldwin, a thesp that, spent most of the eighties starring in yawnsome popcorn pleasers, the nineties churning out more misses than hits,...